Lois Kazakoff: Skirmishes in the Clean Tech revolution

Just as the rise of the Internet spawned battles over technology rights and patents, the clean tech revolution has the industry hunkered down behind armies of lawyers fighting over intellectual property rights. One might say the major players — many in Silicon Valley — are fiddling while the planet burns.

Or one can say that without a viable market in both developed and developing countries, the technology to save the warming planet won’t advance at all.

The debate is of particular interest to the Bay Area because many of the companies and institutions involved are here. Both UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have expertise in international collaboration on clean tech research and development, including the invention of fuel-efficient cookstoves for Africa’s poor.

The Center for Environmental Public Policy at UC Berkeley has released a report on the battle over intellectual property rights in the transfer of low-carbon technologies to developing countries. You can read the report, “Who owns the Clean Tech Revolution?” here.

Recognizing the issue is deadlocked, organizers of the U.N. climate conference that begins next week in Copenhagen have put forth proposals for “technology action programs” that would help bring climate-saving technologies to poor nations.

“It is pretty clear that if we continue on with this sort of bipolar situation where, on the one hand, you have companies that say ‘we won’t license technology’ or ‘we don’t like the notion of any sort of mandatory licensing,’ contrasted with, on the other side, you have people saying ‘yes we have to have that,’ it’s really just a recipe for no progress at all. So we really need to find the middle ground, and I think that the partnership concept really gets us there,” said George Romanik, chief intellectual property counsel for the engine design firm of Pratt & Whitney.

A demonstration of how we might manage our common future will be on display next week.